John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

101st Reason to Say Wow? Consumers Actually Buying Windows Vista

Hard as it might be to believe, people are actually buying Windows Vista. After market close yesterday, Microsoft reported a 27% surge in revenue, to $13.76 billion for the first quarter of 2007, its best quarterly revenue growth in eight years, on robust demand for its new operating system.

Vista appears to be selling far better than anyone anticipated. Perhaps even Microsoft itself. Asked during an earnings call for an update on Vista adoption thus far, Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell had this to say:

Clearly we are very happy with the client division overall. As you’ve seen since we launched Vista, the revenue growth has been in excess of 20% three quarters in a row, so the overall [headline] number, very good.

“In terms of the premium mix, also very happy about that. Now, in this case, premium mix brings in both Vista and XP premium sales as well, and that’s tracking in the mid-70s, so 75% for the quarter, and that compares to I believe 59% in the equivalent quarter last year, so up 16 points year over year. So we’re very happy with the adoption of Vista Premium and also happy with the old XP Media sales as well.

“The other thing I’ll point to is on the client annuity agreements, which is probably the best leading indicator we can think of of people’s intention to adopt, that’s still very early in the adoption cycle for businesses, but the volume licensing portion of our business was up 27% in the client area, so that’s a very good leading indicator from our point of view.

“And sort of finally, as a wrapper, year-to-date sales are now 85 million units for Vista. That compares to about 45 million for XP over the same period, so almost twice as much.

“So it’s still early days but progress, we’re very happy with so far.”

Eighty-five million copies of Vista sold. Interesting, considering Vista didn’t exactly arrive at market with rave reviews. Guess “the wow” has got to start sometime, right?

Twitter’s Tanking

December 30, 2013 at 6:49 am PT

2013 Was a Good Year for Chromebooks

December 29, 2013 at 2:12 pm PT

BlackBerry Pulls Latest Twitter for BB10 Update

December 29, 2013 at 5:58 am PT

Apple CEO Tim Cook Made $4.25 Million This Year

December 28, 2013 at 12:05 pm PT

Latest Video

View all videos »

Search »

When AllThingsD began, we told readers we were aiming to present a fusion of new-media timeliness and energy with old-media standards for quality and ethics. And we hope you agree that we’ve done that.

— Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, in their farewell D post